The Runes of Magic Romp
So my playing of LotRO has become a lot more casual lately. I was playing a lot initially, but now I am taking it quite a bit slower. LotRO is my game to play when Rynala is busy doing other stuff and does not have time to game. Weekdays are usually the time I get to play the most. As for WoW, do not ever feel a need to log in currently. I may occasionally stop in for five minutes for a quick chat with friends, but other than that, I do not see myself playing much again until patch 3.2 comes out.
The main game Rynala and I have been playing is Guild Wars. We are about 75% of the way done with the Nightfall campaign and are really enjoying it. We started back into the game a couple months ago and hit a rough patch when working through the Factions campaign. The Factions campaign just pales in excitement and epicness compared to Prophecies and Nightfall. Now that we are back in Nightfall, we are zipping through the game. I hope that Eye of the North turns out to be as exciting.
This past weekend, however, we decided to give Runes of Magic a try. I originally had played this game back when it was in beta in February and left the game due to lack of community at the time. Now that I have someone to play along side, I am enjoying the game quite a bit more. I am leveling up a Priest/Knight and Rynala is leveling up a Warrior/Mage. We both got to about level 14 on our main class and level 8 on our secondary class.
The game does some things that I really like. There are even questing designs like I talked about recently. In the middle of every town there are bulletin boards with lists of repeatable quests and although only 10 of the repeatable bulletin board quests can be done a day, you can do however many of each quest you want multiple times until you reach 10. The quest text in this game is VERY brief. An example of a quest would be: "Farmer Joe posted this notice: Beetles are in the crops. I hate beetles ruining my crops. Please kill them all." I love this design.
While it is not a game that I would end up devoting my full focus to, it has been a nice diversion. The questing is your standard affair of kill ten rats or deliver this package, but that has never really bothered me. I have really been just taking this game as something to play on the side and I think it works well for that. A lot of people write of off as just being a WoW clone and while there are things that seem stolen straight out of WoW, I think the game is better for that. The game has plenty of designs on its own that help it stand out in my mind.
The most amazing thing about this game is just how it handles microtransactions and its cash shop. I finally get it. I will probably write more on that tomorrow.